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East German Sports Machine Shadows Vancouver Olympics

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is still coming to terms with its divided past in sports as well as in society and politics.

Ingo Steuer, the coach of gold medal favorites in pairs skating at the Vancouver Olympics, was a teenage informant who wrote reports on fellow athletes for the Stasi, the secret police in East Germany.

Claudia Pechstein, one of the last vestiges of the East German sports machine who later became the unified nation’s most decorated Winter Olympian, with nine medals (five gold) in speedskating, has been barred from these Games for suspicion of using illicit blood-boosting drugs.

Her case brings an indirect but chilly reminder of the state-sponsored system of doping in East Germany and the International Olympic Committee’s highly criticized response to an authoritarian regime that gave steroids and other drugs to thousands of athletes, many of them unknowing teenagers.

Photo

The German team of Aliona Savchenko, left, and Robin Szolkowy is coached by Ingo Steuer, who worked for the East German secret police, the Stasi. Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Just last month, a retired track athlete, Gesine Tettenborn, renounced her position on an East German 4x400-meter relay team that set a world record in 1984.

Tettenborn, 47, who acknowledged that she took banned substances as a 17-year-old in preparation for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, said she would feel responsible if young athletes used performance-enhancing drugs to set similar records.

“It’s never too late for an admission,” said Thomas Bach, the president of the German Olympic Committee and an I.O.C. delegate. “We appreciate this.”

Few athletes who became stars in East Germany are still competing two decades later. Unless they were 18 or older when the wall fell, they can no longer be investigated for possible association with the Stasi, which penetrated every aspect of life in the authoritarian nation, a spokesman for the German Olympic Committee said.

A more wary approach is taken with head coaches, doctors and other high officials named to German teams for the Winter and Summer Games. They are vetted by a special sports commission to determine whether their secret police files contain implications of official involvement or harm done to others by their actions.

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Mandy Wötzel and Ingo Steuer won the European title in 1995. Credit
Joachim Herrmann/Reuters

“Regarding athletes, this should be over by now,” said Walter Tröger, a former president of the German Olympic Committee. “For the other persons, it will not be. We have to deal with this until it comes to an end, as long as these people live.”

Competing for a unified Germany, Steuer, now 43, won a bronze medal in pairs skating at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. It was later discovered that as a teenager, he signed a contract with the Stasi, wrote 84 reports about others from 1985 to 1989 under the alias Torsten and was paid 4,000 East German marks, or about $2,800 today, German officials said.

According to news accounts, he was accused of informing on a skater who considered defecting to France and of spying on the two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt. Before and after the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, German Olympic and skating officials tried to bar Steuer as a coach. He seemed defiant, unapologetic, Olympic officials said. But each time, he prevailed in court.

Three years ago, Steuer finally acknowledged and apologized for his collaboration with the Stasi. For the Vancouver Games, he was welcomed into the German team. He will coach Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy in the pairs competition beginning Sunday.

In an e-mail response to questions, Steuer said that only in recent years had he understood how the Stasi had manipulated him. He said the government began observing him after he won the world junior pairs championship. As a teenager, Steuer said, he later developed a trusting relationship with his minder, who seemed to understand and help solve many of his problems.

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From left, Elizabeth Manley, Katarina Witt and Debi Thomas in 1988. Witt, a favorite of East German officials, was still spied on by the Stasi.Credit
Associated Press

“I dropped all hesitation and always opened my heart to him,” Steuer said. “It did not occur to me that I had done something wrong. Unfortunately, I only noticed far too late.”

Witt said that Steuer was “young and naïve” and that “what he said or wrote about me didn’t hurt me.”

“It’s not right to judge from the outside, from the point of view of someone who has grown up with a lot of liberty,” Witt said, advising against the one-sided telling of history. “You can’t imagine how it was.”

Still, some Germans remain torn by Steuer’s belated welcoming into the Olympic team.

“As historians, we have to condemn what he did,” said Martin Krauss, a Berlin-based journalist who has written extensively about the Stasi and doping. “It’s never O.K. to write reports and give them to the secret police. But it was 20 years ago, and he was young.”

Steuer’s case is viewed in contrast to that of Witt, who was a favorite of Erich Honecker, the East German leader, but was also spied on regularly by the Stasi. Even supposed details of her sex life were documented. She is not seen as a collaborator.

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The speedskater Claudia Pechstein has been barred this year on suspicion of drug use.Credit
Rainer Jensen/European Pressphoto Agency

“She’s a victim of the Stasi,” Bach said.

Witt is in Vancouver as a broadcaster and to promote Munich’s bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. She is viewed as someone who used her success, and charming and wily personality, to gain a privileged life on both sides of the wall. For that, she is admired and criticized.

“I always felt the East Germans thought she was a capitalist and the West Germans felt she was a communist,” said Brian Boitano, an 1988 Olympic champion and longtime friend and skating partner of Witt’s. “She’s famous, but nobody quite understands her.”

Pechstein, 37, had been aiming for her sixth Winter Games as a speedskater. But last February, she was accused by her sport’s world governing body of manipulating blood levels in an apparent attempt to increase her oxygen-carrying capacity.

She has denied cheating, but Pechstein’s eastern German upbringing has raised echoes of the state-sanctioned doping system there that bore the Orwellian name Supporting Means. Tettenborn, the retired sprinter, told the German magazine Der Spiegel in forsaking her spot on the world-record relay that “it is clear for some that I am now one of those who dirtied the past.”

Her rejection of the record reminded some critics that the previous I.O.C. president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, treated suspicions of East German doping with political expediency. To entice the nation’s participation in the 1988 Seoul Olympics in South Korea after boycotts diminished the Summer Games in 1980 and 1984, Samaranch awarded the Olympics’ highest honor to Honecker and Manfred Ewald, East Germany’s sports minister.

“The I.O.C. buried their heads in the sand,” said Steven Ungerleider, the author of “Faust’s Gold,” about the East German doping system. “It’s a story that will never go away.”

Referring to the Stasi and the divided German past, Steuer agreed.

“As long as everyone is not able and willing to talk about their past, this issue will continue to occupy us for generations,” he said. “Always new things will come to light which we could not have imagined.”

Correction: February 16, 2010

A picture caption on Sunday with an article about Germany’s continuing efforts to come to terms with its divided past in sports, including then-East Germany’s state-sponsored system of doping athletes, misspelled the given name of a figure skater in some editions. She is Mandy Wötzel, not Mendy. The article also misstated, in some editions, the country for which Wötzel and Ingo Steuer skated in 1995. It was Germany  not East Germany, which was reunified with West Germany in 1990.

A version of this article appears in print on February 14, 2010, on Page SP10 of the New York edition with the headline: Shadow of East Germany Lingers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe